MSN Virus

My brother uses MSN Messenger and recently while on msn, he got a message saying that one of his friends was trying to send him a file and so he clicked accept assuming it was a trusted source. Anyway, he had a top of the range virus scanner installed and he had on access scanner disabled

He opened it. I was connected to MSN in another room at the same time and it came up saying my brother was trying to send me these attachments and I twigged straight away what it was. I ran a virus scan on my brothers pc and removed 2 files. My brother had not manually sent me the files and when I ran to my brothers pc and closed down msn, it realised that files were being shared at the time.

hey i got this from a m8 and it works it gets rid of the virus
1). Click on the Start button and click on Run
2. Then type in msconfig and click OK
3. You should see a screen that has System Configuration Utility in the blue bar
at the top
4. Click on the Tab that says Startup
5. Locate an entry that says MSN Messenger as the name. The filename will have
PIC1342(2)(1)(1)(2)(1)(1)(1).exe at the right hand side
6. Click the box beside the name MSN Messenger
7. Click the Apply button in the bottom right hand side of the screen
8. Then when prompted restart your computer and when Windows loads up again
locate the file on your computer (it should be in the C:/My Documents/Messenger Received Files directory) and then you should be able to delete it

With my brothers computer, the virus did not take a serious effect and the virus was quickly removed, however a friend of mine also recieved this virus or another form of the virus and it was not so easy.

I have spent 2 nights in a row at my mates house trying to sort out his computer for him. Basically, he had the virus and it was going out through msn but also it was preventing him from opening practicaly any windows in normal mode.

So, he had Norton Internet Security and the subscription had expired. First I was going to uninstall Norton and Install McAfee VirusScan Enterprise 8.0.0 but Norton kept closing. So I installed Avast with Norton still on and removed about 10 trojans. From running Avast, we could tell that the trojans that were already there were downloading more trojans.

So, at the end of the first night, the trojans had gone but we were still experiencing problems so the next day I went around to his house again, we ran the system recovery disk and installed some proffessional security.

We saw a huge increase in speed, probably as the PC was infested with spyware and adware as well.

The latest viruses and worms that are spreading via MSN Messenger make it so dangerous, the best solution would be to not use MSN Messenger at all, to prevent the viruses from spreading further.

Click to expand...

This might be true for IE, which has not actively been developed for 2-3 years, but Messenger 7 is right on it's way and probably many bugs are squashed. And as far as I know ICQ has much more exploits.
IMO whoever surfs the net without antivir is a fool, and now this has became true for Instant messaging as well. Most AVs already scan MSN anyway. So use caution and you'll be safe.